Winter 2004

Talking History

The invaluable art of preserving the past

Becoming actively involved with Australia’s new heritage system, the National Trust and conservation projects of their own can offer students an rewarding way into studying history, writes MARIE WOOD.

Australia has a new national heritage system. For the first time, Australian places of national value, whether they are of natural, Indigenous or cultural significance can be identified and protected.

The system commenced on January 1 2004, following the passage of amendments to the Commonwealth’s landmark environmental legislation, the Environment, Protection and Bio-Diversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. Under these amendments, the very limited Commonwealth powers over the built environment have been stretched to the utmost, providing the Commonwealth, for the first time, with effective powers to protect places that are declared to be of national heritage significance.

What does this have to do with history?

This new national heritage system, like all effective heritage protection schemes, relies on the quality and depth of research about a nominated place to determine its level of heritage significance. In order to assess the significance or values of a place, it must be compared to other similar places. Answers must be sought to questions such as:

• What information (records, artefacts, recollections) are associated with this place?
• What do they tell us about this place, and its place in the national story?

Sound familiar? This process of assessing the significance of a heritage place—amassing information about a place, sifting and assessing the reliability of sources, and developing an understanding of a story through time—models the process of historical inquiry that teachers, students, indeed all historians practise.

Perhaps, though, because it is focussed on something as tangible and concrete as a place, researching the story of a place through time may well be a more effective means to engage your students with the past than some more traditional approaches.

Heritage and history

Heritage can be thought of as the past crystallised. Researching a place is more concrete than learning about other aspects of the past because you begin with the present— with the place you are researching— and it’s practical; it can lead to all kinds of pragmatic outcomes.

Everyone is being encouraged to consider possible nominations, and the public will be encouraged to actively monitor the care and management of listed places. It’s a remarkably democratic process, and one you and your students may choose to actively participate in.

Visit www.deh.gov.au/cgibin/ahdb/search.pl  to find information about the places which have been nominated so far, and you will have the opportunity to comment (though it must be said that to this point, wending your way around the website is rather too complicated).

To ensure the National Heritage List nominates places which over time can tell the whole story of Australia, the intention is to focus on themes, and the first three themes, announced by the Prime Minister on 18 December 2003 at the launch of the Distinctively Australian program are:

• A Wide and Ancient Land
• Building the Nation
• The Australian Spirit

National Trust sites can all be found at the Commonwealth heritage gateway site at www.heritage.gov.au

How else can heritage assist with history?

‘Heritage’ is a polymath term; it can be used to cover almost anything that has value or meaning from the past— from the very personal to the nationally significant. The family farm and the Sydney Opera House are both of heritage value, the difference is the degree of significance attached to each object or place. This, in turn, is determined by the level of community meaning the place has.

Understanding the history and value of local places allows students to advocate for a place, to care for it, to work as citizens within their school, their local community or even on the broader national stage.

Student activities centred around researching and advocating for heritage places cross the curriculum, illustrate civics and provide a direct experience of the complexities of citizenship responsibilities.

For specific activities, see the Making History materials provided by the National Centre for History Education at www.hyperhistory.org

Heritage assessment is values based, focussed as it is on identifying and protecting places that have meaning to communities, so it provides a framework within which students can consider values outside their own immediate interests.

So, researching ‘heritage’ can complement and support historical inquiry for students. How does the National Trust support this approach?

The National Trust

The National Trust is the oldest and largest community advocate for heritage in the nation. Formed first in NSW by Annie Wyatt, a woman equally concerned by the loss of trees around her home as by the destruction of Sydney’s wonderful colonial buildings, the National Trust has been the community voice for heritage for almost 60 years.

The National Trust as an educational resource

The National Trust can be considered the biggest educational resource in the country. The Trusts have heritage properties all over Australia just waiting to welcome students. With a variety of educational programs and experiences fashioned to capture hearts and minds, National Trust educational programs are a treasure trove of rich and stimulating opportunities for students.

History touches on the whole of life, and Trust programs can take students right across the curriculum, from history to literature, from environmental concerns to maritime exploration, from colonial conflict to Ned Kelly’s last days. National Trust properties do indeed cover the nation’s story.

This holistic approach is exemplified by the Golden Pipeline educational programs that have been developed by the West Australian National Trust.

The Golden Pipeline

The Golden Pipeline was the dream of the Premier of WA, C.Y. O’Connor, who, a century ago, recognised the need to supply water from the coast to the developing goldfield towns.

The pipeline continues to supply water, but over time, a number of the pump stations have fallen into disuse, and much of the earlier technology has been discarded. Many of the wheat belt communities along the pipeline route had fallen on hard economic times.

The WA Trust has transformed these discarded places into vibrant centres for learning, and in doing so, has brought the pipeline right back into the hearts and minds of today’s young West Australians.

Imaginative and stimulating programs that interpret the goldfields water supply scheme and the Golden Pipeline have been developed, supportive of the Western Australian Society and Environment learning area, and the overarching learning outcomes.

As well as visits to two of the pump stations, and programs directly associated with the history of the pipeline itself, broader links have been forged to mine the pipeline sites and all they represent as effectively as possible. School-based programs have been developed with the local water authority to support Waterwise and other environmental programs. The recent Water Bottle and Time Capsule projects involved almost 12,000 students and 44 schools.

A creative approach has been taken to encouraging students to empathise with those who endured the terrible difficulties that plagued the pipeline builders and their families. Pumping Poetry follows Pipedreams on the Pipeline, the recent joint centenary project with the WA State Literature Centre, in which writers and poets travelled the length of the pipeline encouraging students to imaginatively realise their understanding of life on the pipeline over time.

Conserving Australia’s heritage: the Burra Charter

The conservation (that is the care and management) of Australian heritage places is governed by a voluntary code of practice known as the Burra Charter. This is the Australian version of an international convention concerning the management of historic sites, originally developed by a UNESCO-based organisation, the International Convention on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS).

The Burra Charter is a very special document. Australia has been a world leader in heritage practice for decades, and it is now a much admired and imitated document—a Chinese version now governs heritage conservation in China. The Australian Charter, among the first and now one of the most influential in the world, was written by a group of heritage practitioners (architects, archeologists, historians) at Burra in SA in 1979, and has been revised several times since.

The Charter sets out a step-bystep process for the identification, assessment and conservation of heritage places. The steps are set out simply and clearly, and are a model of clarity; they can be followed by anyone. The basic precept of the Burra Charter is: do as little as possible, and as much as necessary, to conserve the significance of the site.

The Burra Charter process again models an approach to historical inquiry that can be readily adapted:

• gather evidence about the place
• assess the evidence, identify gaps in information and seek to fill them
• based on the evidence, assess the significance of the place
• determine what is needed to protect the values/aspects of the place that matter most
• plan to conserve and protect the aspects of the place that matter most.

The process is very clear, and could be used by students of almost any age to work out how to care for a place or an artefact of meaning or value to them personally; or which matters to their class, school or community.

The Charter has been published in a number of formats, including a video for schools. It is published on the Australian ICOMOS website at www.icomos.org/australia/

Summary

So, encourage your students to visit heritage sites, to follow the establishment of Australia’s new national heritage system and to participate actively in the discovering, documenting and conserving of their own and the nation’s heritage.

You and they will be amply rewarded.

Marie Wood is National Conservation Manager of the Australian Council of National Trusts.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au